PUBLISHER'S NOTE: the following article was written more than ten
years ago, and appeared, in two parts, in TLE Number 30, June 15,
1997. I have not revised them here, except to combine them into a
single piece. Those wishing to see the originals may find them at:

As desperate as the abusive police situation may be today, the
warning signs were already plain, at least to me, a decade ago, four
years before this century's "Reichstag Fire", the attack on the World
Trade Center on September 11, 2001, gave the government the excuse it
needed to turn the entire country into a prison. I will be writing an
update and followup article as soon as possible.

********

JUNE 15, 1997

THE PROBLEM

Every day we hear of some act of brutality carried out by federal,
state, or local "law enforcement" against individuals or groups whose
only crime was the exercise of their unalienable individual, civil,
Constitutional, and human rights. "Policemen" at every level of
government have become, more than any mere military organization, the
"standing army" hated and feared by America's Founders.

There are many reasons for this, among them a failure on the part
of those Founders to provide for proper enforcement of the first ten
amendments to the Constitution, commonly known as the Bill of Rights.
Much of today's freedom movement (consisting of Libertarians,
"Constitutionalists", and even a growing number of "liberals") is
attempting to identify the root causes of America's ills.

As long as the causes of a problem are being addressed, there's
nothing wrong with ameliorating symptoms, as well. You may get a
CAT-scan to see why you suffer migraines, but you also take an
aspirin. Accordingly, I suggest the following stepsmany of which
I've considered for decadesto begin treating the symptoms by which
we know we've all begun living in a police state.

Any one of these measures (or all of them together), may be
pursued by concerned individuals and groups who find them interestingwithout
regard to their political ideologyas conventional
legislation, as constitutional or charter amendments, as initiated
referenda, or as a part of settlements in lawsuits.

SOME ANSWERS

First, there being no provision in the United States Constitution
for a national police force of any kindand in compliance with the
9th and 10th Amendmentsall federal "law enforcement" agencies must
be abolished and their present and former employees subjected to legal
scrutiny of their current and past activities. As "interim" measures,
these agencies and their employees will be forbidden to carry or
employ weapons of any kind, and will be permitted to operate at all
only under close supervision by local police.

All military weapons, vehicles, and aircraft presently in use by
these agencies will be surrendered for distribution to the populace
who paid for them.

Independent civilian review boards will be established to insure
that federal conduct remains fully consistent with the Bill of Rights.
No pleas of secrecy or "national security" will be permitted to impede
their investigations. Any willful misunderstanding, for political
purposes, of any article of the Bill of Rights on the part of any
elected or appointed official will be considered evidence of an
intention to commit a crime against the Constitution.

LOCAL POLICE

All police officers at state, county, and local levels of
government will be required to wear uniforms on duty and be forbidden
to act in a professional capacity when off duty, or wearing civilian
clothing. All uniforms must bear individual name patches and badge
numbers easily legible from a distance of fifty yards, and it will be
unlawful to cover or obscure them in any way. It will also be unlawful
for police officers to conceal their facial features with any sort of
helmet or mask, or to wear camouflaged or military-style clothing.

All vehicles employed by local police must be clearly marked and
readily identifiable, with highly-visible registration numbers.
Agencies at every level of government will be forbidden the use of
helicopters which, in recent years, have increasingly become an
instrument of state terrorism and statist oppression.

Police officers may not possess, carry, or employ any weapon
prohibited to civilians, nor carry a weapon of any kind off duty,
concealed or otherwise, until laws at every level of government
forbidding civilians to do so in exactly the same manner have been
repealed. Bullet resistant clothing and equipment, which seem only to
have engendered an increasingly contemptuous disregard for the lives,
property, and rights of civilians, will be strictly forbidden.

To avoid conflict of interest and prevent over-zealous enforcement
of statues and ordinances, all fines and traffic revenues will be
divided equally among the American Civil Liberties Union and Amnesty
International (provided they adopt a view of the Bill of Rights which
is consistent from article to article), and state Libertarian parties,
provided they send nothing to the national Libertarian Party until its
own internal corruption has been eliminated.

Handcuffs or other restraining devices may not be used on those
arrested for nonviolent crimes, especially for purposes of public
display. Arresting officials will be held fully and individually
responsible under civil and criminal law for any humiliation to which
arrestees later proved innocent are subjected.

In "seige" situations (which may not be initiated merely because
someone expresses a wish to be left alone, locks himself in his house,
or possesses weapons) authorities will be prohibited from interrupting
telephone or other utilities, or from restricting free access by the
media to the subjects of the operation.

A NEWER COVENANT

Individual officers of both the military and police will be
required to prove themselves all over again by publicly taking an oath
to uphold, defend, and enforce, without reservation, every separate
article of the Bill of Rights. Any police officer or member of the
military who refuses to obey an order which, in good faith, he or she
considers to be unconstitutional or unlawful will receive executive
clemency and, should the order prove to have been unconstitutional or
unlawful, promotion and reinstatement to full pay and benefits.

PRIVACY AND CIVIL LIBERTIES

The American people will have their privacy again, whether the
government and government-chartered corporations want them to or not.
In general, owing to an established pattern of abuse by police
agencies and individual officers, all wiretaps, internet surveillance,
and other invasions of individual privacyor any procedure,
including taxation, which requires disclosure of private financial
informationwill be forbidden. It was a grave mistake to grant such
privileges to government in the first place. For the foreseeable
future, the Fourth Amendment must be read as if the word
"unreasonable" did not appear in it.

Given the unmistakable injunction of the Second Amendment,
possession or use of any device for detecting personal weapons
(whether by government at any level or by government-chartered
corporations) will be illegal and severely punishable.

It is inappropriate for sovereign individuals to be sorted and
tracked as if they were breeding livestock or government property.
Understandably, there is no provision whatever for it to be found in
the Constitution. Fingerprint records and other identification systems
presently maintained by government or by government-chartered
corporations must be destroyed and practices like fingerprinting,
voiceprinting, and retinal photography strictly forbidden.

A PERSONAL MESSAGE

To individual members of the police and military, I say that the
time for denial is over. If any of these proposed measures angers you,
remember that Bill Clinton did it to you. Janet Reno did it to you.
Louis Freeh did it to you. Larry Potts did it to you. Lon Horiuchi did
it to you. And you let them do it. Until you can prove the contrary to
the people you are sworn to protect and serve, you're no different
than they are. You're the same as those who:

Firebombed and burned an entire neighborhood out of existence when
one group of its residents was accused of nothing more serious than
disturbing the peace;

Assassinated a harmless old man simply in order to steal his
valuable real estate;

Shot a little boy and his dog to death, then blew his mother's
head off with a telescopically-sighted high-powered rifle as she held
her baby in her arms;

Illegally confined, terrorized, poison-gassed, and machinegunned
dozens of innocent men, womenand 22 little childrenin the
church that was their home;

Tortured, intimidated, and attempted to dispose of political
prisoners by denying them necessary and lawfully prescribed medication
and proper medical assistance;

Threatened and confiscated evidence from independent investigators
when they questioned the government's cover-up of an airliner crash
that killed hundreds;

Viciously stomped helpless kittens to death underfoot in an
attempt to frighten the innocent victims of a narcotics raid carried
out at the wrong address;

And committed any of the hundreds of thousands of other brutal
acts that have begun to transform a once free and noble country into a
horror-filled dictatorship.

TIME TO STAND DOWN

The Cold War is over. The War on Drugs was intended from the
beginning to destroy the Constitution you swore to uphold and defend.
Don't let socialists, elected by a minority, use your body and mind to
force illegal, immoral, alien ideas on an unwilling populace. Your one
goal must be to enforce the highest law of the land, the first ten
amendments to the Constitution, the Bill of Rights. Indeed, that's the
only possible justification for the existence of government.

Don't let deskbound, overpaid "superiors" tell you what the Bill
of Rights means. Remember your oath. Don't let judges and lawyerswho
only stand to benefit from the destruction of the Bill of Rightstell
you what it means, either. Do what most Americans haven't done
for half a century. Think for yourself.

Ask yourself this question: if you were one of America's Founding
Fathers and you'd just fought a successful revolution against the most
powerful and heavy-handed government on Earth, and the last thing in
the world you wanted for yourself or your children or your
grandchildren was to stumble beneath the heels of its jackboots ever
again, what would you want the Bill of Rights to mean?

And if the first act, under martial law, of that powerful,
heavy-handed government had been to try to take your guns away, would
you have written a Second Amendment to guarantee its "right" to own
and carry weapons? Or would you have written it to forbid government
from having anything to do with your guns?

I say again, it's time to end the War on Drugs. Think back: every
dime ever spent on it has only made the problem worse, not better.
Many decent individuals have come to believe that, from the outset, it
was never meant as anything but a war against the people of the United
States of America. It's time to end it, to abolish the DEA, FBI, ATF,
and every other federal agency wihich is not specifically mentioned in
the Constitution, and is for that reason alone, illegal.

My last proposal is that all hiring for these agencies cease
immediately, and that individual officers who survive scrutiny of
their past activities be made US marshals, given a new assignmentBill
of Rights enforcementand be turned loose on politicians,
bureaucrats, and judges, instead of the American people.

Four-time Prometheus Award-winner L. Neil Smith has
been called one of the world's foremost authorities on the ethics
of self-defense. He is the author of 25 books, including The
American Zone, Forge of the Elders, Pallas, The Probability Broach,
Hope (with Aaron Zelman), and his collected articles and speeches,
Lever Action, all of which may be purchased through his website
"The Webley Page" at
lneilsmith.org.

Ceres, an exciting sequel to Neil's 1993 Ngu family novel
Pallas was recently completed and is presently looking for a
literary home.

Neil is presently working on Ares, the middle volume of the
epic Ngu Family Cycle, and on Roswell, Texas, with Rex F. "Baloo"
May.

The stunning 185-page full-color graphic-novelized version of The
Probability Broach, which features the art of Scott Bieser and was
published by BigHead Press
www.bigheadpress.com
has recently won a Special Prometheus Award. It may be had through the publisher, at
www.Amazon.com,
or at BillOfRightsPress.com.